Researchers create ‘electronic tongues’ to detect cancer in early stages

In a first, researchers have developed a new ‘electronic tongue’ that can assist doctors in detecting bladder cancer in its early stages.

Researchers in Spain have developed a better way of diagnosing and monitoring bladder cancer in its early stages by inventing a complex electronic device which is more efficient, simple and also cost effective as compared to traditional methods such as cystoscopies or urine cytology tests.

As per Medical News Today, the American Cancer Society (ACS) has shown that bladder cancer affects thousands of people, many resulting in death. To help in diagnosing it much earlier, the team created ‘electronic tongues’, which a non-invasive technique that harness power of ‘taste-detecting’ sensors.

Scientists create device to detect cancers through breath

Electronic tongues are a voltammetric device that copies the mechanism of human taste through using pattern-information software and sensors that detect soluble compounds. Scientists generally use the device in order to analyze food, water, wine, or explosives, but they can also use it for testing samples of biofluid for detecting diseases.

“There are several trials that have received the approval of the FDA — Food and Drug Administration of the United States — for their use in the diagnosis and monitoring of bladder cancer, but none of them improves the results of a cystoscopy," explained one of the researchers Javier Monreal.

The electronic tongues were created with the help of data from previous studies for effective ways to test the urine samples. The researchers also suggested that using these electronic tongues for testing urine samples might prove to be a cost effective and easy-to-use way for detecting bladder cancer that too in its earliest stages.

Co-author Carmen Martinez Bisbal said that the initial results of the study gave a 75% accuracy rate, which shows that the ‘shapes of current waveforms induced in urine through pulse voltammetry could allow, with an appropriate processing of the data, for a noninvasive diagnosis in the monitoring of patients with bladder cancer.”